I am once again asking people to stop using this image incorrectly.

More on topic - I have no idea what's up with RGL 6's specifically but not only are they historically much more conservative with regard to even asking about questions regarding banning unlocks compared to HL (not unbanning though!), they are even more reticent with either conducting or releasing survey results at all (or both).

Take a look at this page of all previous articles and ctrl +f "Survey Results". Starting from season 8 (2021 for reference) all but one season of HL is represented, and some times even the midseason! This has translated into direct action as well and isn't merely fluff; a few seasons ago loch became a problem during playoffs and grand finals. Directly afterward the next survey had a survey about the loch and before the next season even started it was banned. I seriously cannot think of a single instance in which the turnaround was that fast in 6's.

Regarding 6's, go back to that same page, look at "survey results" and see how many articles are about 6s seasons. You will only get 2 results. One was before season 14 (January 2024), the next was season 8 in 2022. Why is 6s, the face of tf2 competitive, seemingly treated as an afterthought compared to HL? I know historically this has been the case (see the whole "traditional 6s" fiasco and the RGL mission statement lol) but man this disparity is bad. I understand tf2 youtubers will make endless videos if an unlock gets banned but controversial opinion incoming: perhaps a community league should strive to serve its own playerbase above all else. There is something cosmically funny about the fact that the format that more closely resembles pubs is less beholden to the opinions of pubbers [who have no intention of playing competitive] than 6s does.

I will push back against this slightly; these are HL survey results about the loch once the aforementioned problematic season concluded. This was done across all divs iirc.

https://i.imgur.com/JtK2AVL.png

Only 15% don't really have an opinion and notably loch in HL was an extremely short-lived phenomenon that didn't even have enough time to trickle-down to other divs (I saw many many questions in RGL discord from main or below HL players about the ban). I would be extremely surprised if the % in 6's who do not have an opinion/don't care is substantially higher.

Edit: Here is a recent survey about unbanning loch; you can see (at the very least limited to people who actually respond to surveys lol) that proportion of no opinion is still around the same range.

https://i.imgur.com/XnduEpV.png

It is pretty bad that whenever I log in and see a relatively new thread with a high post count I instantly assume that it's either 1. new LAN thread or 2. new pedo thread.

That being said while drama is funny I think the biggest loss is the lack of actually thoughtful discussion about the game. Granted I'm not going to lie and say that like 2014-2018 era tftv was a veritable Library of Alexandria or anything but I can use myself as a control and say that superficially my knowledge of 6's relative to my entrenchment in the community was much higher than it is today. Players of all skill levels used to talk about the game. Was the average open player dropping a knowledge bomb? Probably not, but at the very least I got to see opinions and discussions and it's a little bit surprising (disturbing, really) how much you can pick up just via osmosis.

Nowadays insightful posts still exist but they are few and far between which I find quite sad. They are also pretty decentralized (though to be fair most of the truth nukes in the past were buried within like 50 page long ESEA open happenings threads). An example would be loafe and botmode's post in the bagel thread.

This type of 'micro strategy' (specifically talking about one specific class matchup on one specific map in one specific game state) is so difficult to find these days. The broad strokes of the game still exist, and so does theorycrafting (i.e. is this one unlock Literally Hitler?) but I seriously miss the type of nerd essay (meant in the most positive way possible) analysis of one snapshot, one frame if you will, of tf2.

Pains me to think about how much hidden knowledge is squirreled away in random team discords that are archived away or long inactive.

Massive props to wG EU absolute iron fortress mental, very well played by them.

Enlighten my NA burger mind but if this is just referring to Gully c'mon man it's a massive stretch to say that they don't get or play for the config cause of that alone. Like TurboTabs said it's grand finals of lan bro they probably just got excited and had a momentary lapse; you can even see what looks like botmode trying to get off the point once he realizes (marmaloo pointed this out on cast as well).

Aside from waiting until winlimit is set infinite overtime changes risk/reward of pushes but I don't think that really affected g6, it's not like they rushed a push out of last or something and just exploded because of it. IIRC they had maybe one last push on process which they rushed because they had picks instead of waiting for uber ad but to me (granted I am bad) it's not a crazy play to go for. G6 had many good opportunities that they should and ended up going for but simply couldn't close out. While that probably screws you over harder on b4nny config I wouldn't call that "not understanding" the format. But IDK maybe I missed something else.

b6nny

This is my largest problem with it as well. It's pretty clear to me that they are being incredibly inconsistent on this manner alone because they know that banning null movement would be massively unpopular and they think that they can 'get away' with banning the ctap script. But they are basically the same in this regard.

FWIW I'm not suggesting they ban null movement, I just think it is pretty ironic that considering the whole student govt larp that RGL loves to do they are hilariously inconsistent when it comes to mods/scripts. Like the use at your own risk mods section still exists. What the hell does that even mean lmfao. Metal footsteps are only """allowed""" because they didn't want to ban exa (which I would've respected more tbh), something tells me that if more admins were soldier mains maybe the 1 tick script would've been use at your own risk!

Is this just the 500ms interp stuff? I remember trying it out (in pubs do not execute me) for shits and giggles and like dolphin rider said it felt totally unplayable rockets just like lag everywhere and shit. I guess maybe it matters less for heavy since you don't really dodge but it genuinely felt horrible. You can try it out yourself. I remember it being pretty miserable unless there's some weird sweet spot between 100ms (default) and 500ms (max) where you get some cool cheater benefits but it's still playable.

Edit: My point is merely to echo dolphin rider's that I'm surprised if that's all it was because I personally can't imagine high interp being worth the trade-offs.

This quiz has had more historical impact on tf2 than any rgl survey.

This is a flawed argument. You don't sit on the sniper because the sniper "needs it", i.e. they would be useless or bad otherwise. You sit on the sniper because it is worth it; sniper is so good that it is entirely worth dedicating classes to just sit on them and afk to support. It's a very deliberate choice that people make; the value add of an engineer actually playing the game is seen as lower than just placing them in a no man's land like lakeside ruins or back of product cliff to lower the odds of the sniper getting stabbed.

Of course this alone is not evidence that sniper is broken (could be the case that engineer/pyro are just that bad, though I sort of doubt it), but the argument that people sitting on him = people need to sit on him is quite poor. Empirical evidence shows you what is perceived as being optimal, and optimal is not the same thing as necessary.

Not all teamwork is created equal, to just treat them as the same is at best seriously misinformed. It does not take that many brain cells to play pyro and just sit on your sniper; it is much more difficult to coordinate pressure on the sniper (especially if you currently don't have one) so you don't just die during a dry push.

I'm going to keep it real chief the analysis in this video is really bad. Lot's of things I could say about basically every point but the fact that a highlander player in big 2025 nonironically said "just don't peak the sniper and get your spy to stab him bro" is a little insane. This mentality is how ppl just autolose every koth map.

Also there's something really funny about trying to rebut the idea that sniper has no counters (outside of another sniper) by providing a counterexample that requires two players.

I have delayed defending this year (ok this is cope my dumb ass probably wasn't going to anyway) but yeah it is fucking brutal right now. Collaborators are getting funding canceled and historically 'safe' topics in biomedical applications (i.e. cancer + alzheimer's) are getting nuked as well.

Apparently (quite surprising to me anyway) the shortest airline distance between Bogota, Colombia to Sao Paulo, Brazil is actually absurdly close to the distance between Bogota and Chicago (2684 vs 2705 miles). Add just a touch of shitty routing and I can see Colombians on average pinging lower to NA.

Mercator projection and it's consequences.

the addition of markdown formatting really adds to the bit

Missed this post somehow, but disagree here, at least for the statistics half/portion of data science. There's so much shit statistics advice out there that it's trained on, and I see this a lot as a TA, but if you don't already have a good understanding of the subject it's very easy for the AI to gaslight you into thinking something is true when it's not.

Here's an example:

https://i.imgur.com/kzVOZP4.png

This probably seems reasonable at first glance but this is just incorrect.

That being said models will always improve (wouldn't be surprised if the better AI's can get this right) but when you're first learning things it can be pretty misleading.

Would be more cool if it didn't somehow make the "tech bro who doesn't know anything about other fields but definitely knows they're all doing it wrong" even more annoying.

Somewhere along the way it went from "Image/text generation is the best way of assessing our ability to learn and generate data from complex distributions" to "artists are cucks and we serve no value and we should just kill them, actually"

Probably lansky on froyo in terms of influence/marking the beginning of the shift.